"Ward, you were a little rough on the Beaver last night."
Posted on 06/03/2004 7:30:15 AM PDT by cyncooper
Breaking News on Fox
Thanks for the comments. Here's something you might find of interest if you haven't seen it yet.
Re: Background on the article below:
Ms. Mylroie was adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign and is the author of "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror" (HarperCollins).
The New York Sun Editorial & Opinion May 24, 2004
Behind the Raid on Chalabi
Laurie Mylroie traces the roots of the Central Intelligence Agency's feud with one Iraqi.
The American campaign against the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, is symptomatic of a long series of missteps on Iraq. When George W. Bush became president, he inherited an accumulation of intelligence failures going back to the 1991 Gulf War.
The Iraq War reflected a radical change from the earlier "containment" policy, but this policy change was not matched by any major change in the way the American
intelligence community viewed Iraq. In that mismatch--a radically new policy implemented without intelligence reform--lies the basic reason for the campaign against Mr. Chalabi.
Although the intelligence community's understanding of Iraq remains fundamentally flawed, the White House has never come to terms with what it means to operate in an environment in which the CIA seriously misunderstands
a critical issue.
When this happened in the 1980s regarding the Soviet
Union, the Reagan administration took steps to correct it, and then succeeded in bringing the Soviets down. Nothing similar occurred regarding Iraq.
The INC ran a highly successful intelligence program, called the Information Collection Program, headed by Mr. Chalabi's long-time aide, Arras Karim, a 38-yearold Shi'a Kurd, whose father had been an official in the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
Mr. Karim himself has fought against Saddam's regime since he was a teenager. He is very smart and very dedicated. Just last week, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, told the U.S. Congress that the ICP "has saved [U.S.] soldiers' lives."
The CIA has a long-standing grudge against Mr. Chalabi and it has made these charges before.The source of the agency's animus is two-fold.
The long-term cause is its Arabist orientation (shared by State's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs).
The agency reflects the perspective of the Sunni Arab
regimes--a preference for authoritarianism over democracy and an animus against the Shi'a.
Back in 1991, the agency believed that Saddam would be overthrown in a coup. Indeed, the current White House envoy on Iraq, Robert Blackwill, himself a figure from Bush 41, recently disclosed the startling information that the CIA told the White House then that Iraq's helicopter squadrons
would oust Saddam and that is why the White House let them fly after the cease-fire.
Of course, the helicopters played a key role in suppressing the widespread popular uprising that erupted against Saddam then.
In 2003, America operated on an expanded version of this notion: the way to get rid of Saddam was to work through the supposedly dissident members of his regime. Probably, that is why none of the 50-some decapitation strikes
against regime figures, including the strike against Saddam that began the war, was successful. At best, it was simply poor information; at worst, it was fed to the agency by Iraqi intelligence.
The CIA advocated, and the White House accepted, the notion that it would be possible to govern a postwar Iraq through the prewar bureaucracies: Baathists without blood on their hands. That has proved a failure.
Iraqis so hated the Baathists that the institutions of the old regime simply collapsed.
Now as America casts about for a way to create an Iraqi government, it has fixed on the United Nations and its Algerian envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi. Mr. Brahimi represents the old Sunni order, and his plans, such that they are,
are unlikely to work. Mr. Chalabi has said as much, and the White House decided it was necessary to marginalize him, though American officials in Baghdad probably went further than anticipated.
A second cause of the animosity toward Mr. Chalabi is grounded in the failure of a CIA-backed coup plot in 1996.
In the mid-1990s,the agency ran two programs to overthrow Saddam. One was the INC, established by Bush 41 with the aim of overthrowing Saddam through a popular insurgency. It
operated out of Northern Iraq, in Kurdish-controlled territory.
The other program was a coup. President Clinton's administration--where George Tenet was NSC adviser on intelligence--actually favored the coup option. It seemed a less risky way to get rid of Saddam than an insurgency.
The agency worked with a former Iraqi general, resident in Jordan (whom Paul Bremer recently appointed Iraq's national security adviser). Mr. Chalabi warned that Saddam had penetrated the coup, but was ignored.
In July 1996, Saddam wrapped up the conspirators, arresting several hundred officers and executing a number of them.
Using the CIA's own communications equipment, the Iraqi mukhabarrat contacted the CIA station chief in Amman
and told him to pack his bags and go home.
The next month, in August, the Clinton administration watched as 40,000 Iraqi troops marched north toward Irbil, just inside Kurdish territory, where the INC was headquartered.
Although opposition leaders, including Jalal Talabani, had been led to believe America would attack those forces,
nothing happened and the lightly equipped INC force was routed.
The Clinton administration wouldn't supply them arms.
ABC News produced a documentary on that debacle. Arras Karim was in Irbil then and explains, "Everybody was waiting for the American fighters.
It was 6,7,8, they will come at 9.We are waiting for the Americans. We are waiting for their promise. And there was no answer."
Mr. Karim is from Baghdad. With the help of a local Kurd, a driver for the INC, Karim and a handful of others succeeded in a dangerous, daring escape across the mountains into Turkey, where they were met by Turkish intelligence. When Mr. Chalabi subsequently went public with the CIA's Iraq
fiascos, he became the agency's enduring enemy.
Among other things, the CIA charged that Mr. Karim was an Iranian agent, although no knowledgeable person believed that.
In 2002, as America prepared for war with Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency assumed responsibility for the INC's intelligence program. It had previously been handled by the
State Department, which was more interested in killing the program than learning from it.
The DIA polygraphed Mr. Karim, including on whether he
worked for Iran. Mr. Karim passed with flying colors.
With all the problems in Iraq, how can Washington turn against a figure who is essentially a political ally and shut down an intelligence program praised by the most senior American military officials?
Mr. Bush is getting faulty information about Mr. Chalabi, because he never took the steps necessary to correct earlier intelligence errors. Nor, most probably, does Mr. Bush understand the prevailing ethos.
Mr. Clinton did not want to address the threat posed by Saddam, as it emerged in the 1990s, and he certainly did not want to do what Mr. Chalabi advocated: support an insurgency to overthrow Saddam.
So people adjusted themselves to the president's view, and with time, Mr. Clinton's view became the overwhelmingly dominant perspective among those dealing with Iraq.
Mr. Bush seems to think that now these people will provide accurate assessments regarding the situation in Iraq. Their personal interest,however, is otherwise. It is to not acknowledge error.
The 9-11 Committee did it's job. They drew blood, got the trophy head. Like Osama, this will only embolden them/libs/dems to go after more.
It's just the smart thing to do; in case anybody ever asks, he can say they haven't talked about it, but he has talked to another attorney about his rights and duties.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean everyone is not out to get you...:-)
There is no indication, regardless of how you want to spin it, that the CIA is fractionalized, as you put it.
They have done a very good job during President Bush's administration, and that is largely due to Tenet's steady hand on the rein.
Chalabi and whatever else you care to bring up are mere and minor flashes of discord in a now remarkably run agency, unlike before Tenet. A good deal of the credit for the great success we had in the BASH and the during the rebuilding effort is clearly due to CIAs efforts. You and I will not know for many - MANY - years just how many terrorist attempts on our home soil they have been able to preclude since 9/11, but they've done GREAT under Tenet w/Bush as president.
.
Please. That honor goes to faithincowboys.
Bring your pail and shovel. There's plenty of room.
;)
They all believed the same Intel.
Bush will handle it.
He's his own best PR.
The DemonicRats are surprised,....plan to hold a caucus to find the real reason Tenet is leaving....Nancy will lead it....Daschle doesn't have his heart in it....
Yep. We no longer have the option of tolerating failure from the CIA.
Excellent!
And how do you get away with using those insults against me I wonder. I hate how some are protected on here.
Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, who believed he was a top candidate for President-elect George W. Bush's Attorney General, quietly took cash gifts totaling about $250,000 from one of his top political fund-raisers, ex-Wall Street financier Jack Dreyfus, Newsweek has learned. The payments were made for nearly a decade and may have cost Keating the nomination, Newsweek reports.
In 1990, when Keating was chief counsel at HUD, Dreyfus offered to give each of his three kids a cash Christmas gift of $10,000. HUD officials approved, agreeing the gifts were unrelated to Keating's official duties. The payments, Keating confirms, continued annually for nearly 10 years after he left HUD, reports Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff in the January 15 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, January 8).
Keating, elected governor in 1994, has never disclosed these gifts in Oklahoma; state law doesn't require it. He sees no problem with the payments. In papers submitted to Bush campaign officials last year, he called Dreyfus "a kind and generous man" who has never asked for "any actions or material returns from me" -- a sentiment he repeated in conversation with Newsweek last week.
Keating first met Dreyfus, founder of the Dreyfus mutual funds, in 1988, when Keating was Ronald Reagan's associate attorney general. Dreyfus met with Keating to promote the virtues of Dilantin, a mood-altering drug he thought could be used to control violent federal prisoners. Keating set up a meeting for Dreyfus, who has no financial interest in the drug, with top officials at the Bureau of Prisons. Nothing came of it, but the two became friends.
Yet over the years Dreyfus continued to press Keating about Dilantin and two years ago, Keating arranged for Dreyfus to meet Oklahoma's state prison director. Nothing came of that session either, Isikoff reports.
Of course. We all know what a good friend you're been to dear Frank all these years, don't we?
I dunno. Perhaps since so much of the executive branch conceivably could be targeted in the leak probe, even Gonzalez's office(however unlikely), it was wise to get someone completely independent. Or perhaps it simply has to do with the intricacies of when and where the WH counsel can represents the president vs. Bush the citizen, and avoiding any limits or potential avenues of future accusations and legal diversionary techniques.
Apparently, Chalabi learned that the US had cracked Iranian encryption codes from a drunken CIA official in Baghdad. He then leaked the information to the Iranians. I wonder if Tenet was that official. Hmm. Pure speculation.
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